March 11, 2014

Source: TED — March 11, 2014 | Elizabeth Jacobs

With just one week left to go until TED 2014, our speakers are putting the final touches on their talks. But that’s hardly all they’ve been up to. This week, check out which speaker has a bold prediction about artificial intelligence, which one put out a call for a more creative condom design, which one wrote about the science of goat arousal and which launched a defense… read more

November 23, 2005

Source: NPR The Diane Rehm Show — November 23, 2005 | Diane Rehm

Diane Rehm of National Public Radio talks with Ray Kurzweil about his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. The inventor and futurist talks about the day when humans will transcend their biological roots. Click below to hear the interview.

November 9, 2010

Source:Big Think — November 9, 2010 | Michio Kaku

Back in July, a team at Tokyo University was one of the first groups to successfully create a system of touchable holograms. If you had a hologram of a small red ball, for example, you could essentially interact with it.

The ball would know when it was near your hand and would appear to bounce off of it. When this technology first made news, it was compared… read more

December 1, 2011

Source:PhysOrg — December 1, 2011 | Stuart Mason Dambrot

In his post-presentation press conference, Kurzweil was asked about the role of our evolutionarily-determined biological drives — and thereby motivation and emotion — as minds merge with machines and AI equals or surpasses human levels. Kurzweil noted that we have a remarkable ability to sublimate our drives, and we do so largely into innovation.

Since he sees the purpose of technology as the transcendence of our biological limitations, one… read more

October 12, 2011

Source:Big Think — October 12, 2011 | Daniel Honan

Big Think | Ray Kurzweil is an expert at predicting the future. Some of his career highlights include foreseeing the fall of the Soviet Union, the invention of the Internet and a computer beating a man at chess.

So what will the coming decades hold for us? In tracking our progress in the technological-evolutionary journey, Kurzweil has identifies six epochs, each of which is characterized by a major… read more

July 10, 2012

Source: PBS Newshour — July 10, 2012

Author, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been a key voice in our occasional series on the future of technology. The latest installment on the advent of immortality debuted here on Making Sen$e July 9.

As with economist Paul Krugman, our extended interview with Kurzweil included many fascinating bits that didn’t make the final cut. So we continue Tuesday with one of them — a closer look at what Kurzweil… read more

November 27, 2012

Source: NPR The Diane Rehm Show — November 27, 2012 | Diane Rehm

Inventor, futurist and author Ray Kurzweil has long predicted humans will one day be able to transcend the limitations of their biology. In a new book, Kurzweil explains why that day is coming sooner than we might think.

He argues that the expansion of the brain’s neocortex was the last biological evolution man needed to make. That’s because it is inevitably leading to “truly intelligent machines,”… read more

January 23, 2013

Source:Las Vegas Weekly — January 23, 2013 | Mark Adams

I know you were recently snatched up by Google. What are you working on at the moment?

I’ll be working on enabling computers to understand natural language. When you write a news article or a blog post you’re not just creating a bag of words, you’re creating semantic meaning. It’s remarkable how search works, but it could be even more powerful if it understood the key… read more

May 2, 2013

Source:The Georgia Straight — May 2, 2013 | Adrian Mack

It might sound silly to you or I, but Ray Kurzweil prays for machine intelligence. Kurzweil is popularly known as one of the high priests of transhumanism, or the belief that technology will eventually supersede human biology. He shows up in Google and the World Brain to explain the so-called singularity, or that moment in time — in 2045, if Kurzweil is right — when machines finally outpace human intelligence. After… read more